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Comment by _carl_jung | Hacker News Reader

I believe (partially anecdotally and partially from reading articles over the years) that a big part of this problem is more like "mis-education", rather than "under-education". In primary and high school education in the UK, computing is a dire situation.

It's clear that being good at using a computer is a huge asset in modern society, so why don't we gear education towards it? Programming ought to be seen as vitally important as English and Maths.

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I wouldn't put programming as valuable than English and Math. It's clearly good to know, but honestly since we're talking about exploding debt, how about fiscal education in schools??

You'd need to put that as a 4th year class - if you do it first semester, people would run the numbers and start asking questions.

Which do you think is more valuable knowledge, solving for x or summing the columns in an excel spreadsheet?

Solving for x, because it actually rewires your brain to think logically vs typing a pre-built function with zero understanding. Besides, a huge part of programming is thinking about variables.

OK, maybe bad examples. My point is that it's underemphasised in school.

Practical fiscal education in schools is almost a political nonstarter. If you were to educate high school freshmen on how savings, loans, investments, taxes and retirement planning works for a semester it would greatly alter the voting habits and priorities of that generation.

Just giving out a brochure "What are taxes and how do you pay them" would already be an enormous leap forward.

I would assume going into some of the topics you suggest would lead to school getting swamped by insurance sales people.

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